Thursday, November 15, 2012

After a period of uncertainty and
reflection, new paths are emerging for our work of seeding the
Kingdom here in the District of Columbia. For Capitol
Hill Friends, this month has been one of major reorientation.
Over the past three years, we focused on our regular worship service
as the centerpiece of our community. Yet this month, to my great
surprise, we reached clarity to lay down weekly worship. Instead, we
will direct our energy into the development of vibrant small groups
centered around Bible study, prayer and mutual support.

On November 4th, we held our last
regular meeting for worship in the old format - a two and a half
hour service including Bible reading, singing, waiting worship and a
potluck dinner. While we hope to re-launch a regular worship service
someday, we feel clear that we should not do so until we have
developed a solid core of small groups that serve as a mature and
mutually supportive basis for our community in Jesus.

This January, we plan to begin holding
small group meetings once a week. We have not ironed out all the
details yet, but we sense that our new small group format should
center on prayer, reading the Scripture together, and sharing our
journeys with one another. The format of the small group should be
simple and broadly accessible. We expect that it will last no more
than an hour and a half. For folks in our city, that seems to be the
maximum duration people feel comfortable committing to on an ongoing
basis.

In addition to tightening up the small
group time, we want to make sure that people do not feel trapped or
guilted into attending. We are considering how to offer small group
in bite-sized sequences - for example, we might offer a six-week
study of the Sermon on the Mount. Rather than asking our friends to
commit to attending small group forever, we are looking to
present it as a medium term commitment, measured in weeks rather than
in months or years.

While our number one focus will be on
our small groups, we are also looking at sponsoring events that would
be of interest to our wider communities, featuring compelling guest
presenters (Jon Watts, I am
looking in your direction). When I imagine these events, I envision
something like a very spiritually grounded house concert. Not exactly
a worship service, but a space in which folks are invited to be
spiritually engaged and come away with a deeper sense of connection
with God in Jesus. In the end, everything we do must be about him;
yet we want to engage in ways that strike a chord with the people of
our city.

We have a growing sense that God is
calling us to throw off anything that gets in the way of sharing the
good news of Jesus here in DC. Though the members of Capitol Hill
Friends are deeply steeped in the Quaker tradition, we are
questioning whether many of our traditional forms, language and
practices are serviceable in our present context.

Insofar as there has ever been a Quaker
model of evangelism, it has generally been one that assumed that
outsiders would need to change or discard their culture, dress,
language and symbols before they could become part of the Body of
Christ. For the last 300 years, Quaker communities have largely
developed along the lines of homogenous clusters of people who share
the same politics, class, race, dress codes, insider language and
cultural assumptions.

We are convinced that this is not only
a losing strategy, but that it is ultimately at odds with the example
that Jesus gives us. As we move forward in our mission to embody and
share the love, mercy and justice of Jesus Christ, we are examining
ourselves closely. How are we ourselves called to change, adapting
ourselves to the needs of the city we live in, so that we might more
effectively share the good news?

The truth is, I loved Capitol Hill
Friends just the way it was. Our weekly worship service, with its
combination of Bible reading, singing, waiting worship and food, was
basically my ideal format. Unfortunately, we have seen that my ideal
does not work for most people in our city! If this ministry is to be
about more than my own preferences - if it is to draw all people into
deeper relationship with Jesus - then I will need to sacrifice my
desires and preferences so that the gospel may be most effectively
received.

What needs to be stripped away so that
we can all see Jesus? What is the most effective vehicle for
delivering the gospel message among the people whom we have been
called to serve? How are we called to respond when faithfulness
demands effectiveness?

For a couple of stodgy old Conservative
Quakers like Faith and me, asking these questions feels
revolutionary. From time to time, we ask ourselves with some anxiety:
Are we ditching the Friends tradition altogether?

In a word, "no." Clearly, the
needs of our present context are different from those of Friends 300
years ago - or even fifty years ago. Yet we are also convinced that
the essential truths of the gospel that were re-discovered by the
early Quaker movement are the same foundation that we stand on today.
The forms change, but the substance remains steady. Christ is come to
teach his people himself, and we seek to be a people that is
attentive and listening, ready to follow the Lamb wherever he goes.

As we wrestle with all of these
questions, I am so grateful for the consistent prayers of all our
sisters and brothers across the country and the world. Most everyone
seems to agree: Washington is a very tough place to be. The ground
here is hard, and we know that we cannot plow it up under our own
strength. But through the fervent petitions of the saints and the
mercy of the Holy Spirit, we know and have experienced that we can do
all things through Christ who strengthens us.

3 comments:

Love the small group(s) initiative. Please post specifics of focus(es), dates, days, times and place(s).

Six weeks seems far too little time for really getting into understanding and implementing one of the big commandments: "loving God with all your mind, body and spirit, and "doing onto others as you would have them do onto you" (with accommodation for the different preferences of others), or even any one of the instructions in the Sermon on the Mount, e,g, those about not just not doing but not thinking about doing.

RE: loving God. Isn't a major part of loving God understanding the natural laws of the universe, i.e., of physics, chemistry, biology -- laws that God presumably established? How do non-scientists do this? And, for all, what is the nature of a theology that replaces the myths in the Bible (and in the folk lore of other groups at that time) about the nature and creation of the universe and of homo sapiens with our contemporary scientific understanding of the size, nature and evolution of the universe and of homo sapiens? A challenging but very important -- no, essential task.

And what does it mean in daily life to do onto others as one would have others do onto oneself? This morning I acknowledged a homeless man with eye contact and a greeting. So far, so good. (Office cleaning workers and security guards have uniformly told me that the worse part of their respective job is being invisible -- unacknowledged in any way by many of those about which they clean up for or guard.) But is this ALL that I should be doing in this situation to comply fully with the second great law?

Micah, I wish my meeting would do something similar. We are not growing and some are not pleased with our current format / use of time, but there is extreme hesitancy to change. Perhaps your small group will help us and others understand how to go through a process of thinking about this topic,

And I wish I could get to one of your evening meetings! For now, I'll just need to stay connected to it through your blog post.